Four months ago, Deena Cortese was still a star. She had appeared on Jimmy Fallon, Jay Leno, “The View” — just about every talk show there is. She was a tabloid staple, had presented an award to Lady Gaga and met Beyoncé, who said she was “a big fan.”

Today, Deena is 26. She lives at home with her mom in New Egypt, NJ, about 2 1/2 hours outside of the city. She has a small menagerie of animals (including a blind puppy), a new nose and teeth, and a glass cabinet full of Hummel figurines surrounding glamour shots from her glory days.

“It was a whirlwind,” she says. “I wasn’t ready for it. [But] there are a million upsides.”

Deena had been a late Season 2 addition to MTV’s “Jersey Shore.” Premiering in December 2009, it quickly became the highest-rated show in MTV’s history, turning a motley crew of drunken, crispy, super-gelled guidos and guidettes into America’s sweethearts. Snooki, The Situation, Sammi, Pauly D, Ron-Ron, Vinny, JWoww, Angelina, Deena all became instant stars, name-checked even by the president.

Portrayed by Bobby Moynihan on “Saturday Night Live,” Snooki became a recurring character, rolling into “Weekend Update” with a beehive and a beer — or sometimes “just V8, Red Bull and Jacuzzi water.”

The cast of “Jersey Shore” became a great, beloved national joke — until they began, as reality stars do, to outgrow the very entity that spawned them. In December of last year, due to declining ratings, ballooning salaries and a sort-of-maturing cast, MTV pulled the plug.

Now, four months after the show has gone off the air — it seems eons ago! — most of the stars of “Jersey Shore” are struggling to find their way. Deena says that, unlike most reality stars, she is happy to return to civilian life: The psychological stress of filming and the public scrutiny became too much for her. She is happy to hang out with Chris, her boyfriend of a year and a half. They go to clubs and Six Flags Great Adventure, and out to eat at a supersize log cabin of a place called the Plumstead Grill, where she used to waitress and everyone on staff knows her still.

“Normal people who are on reality shows don’t want to go back to normal life,” Deena says as she picks at a grilled-cheese sandwich over lunch with Chris at the Grill. “I’m one of the rare ones.”

Just then, a bulky young man approaches with a camera and says he’s sorry to interrupt, but could he possibly get a picture.

“Lucky for me,” she says, “I always kept in my head: ‘This is gonna be over soon. I’m not gonna forget who I am.’ ”

The biggest stars of today tend to be reality stars — our Real Housewives, Bachelors and Bachelorettes, Kardashians and Mob Wives and Honey Boo Boos. Unlike actors, however, once their shows have ended, these people rarely have another role to play. Kate Gosselin, Richard Hatch, Paris Hilton, Heidi and Spencer — all attained a rare level of fame, and all have virtually vaporized.

“The vast majority of people on reality shows are not paid and end up briefly known for negative reasons,” says Jennifer Pozner, author of “Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV.” “The folks from ‘Jersey Shore’ are a rarefied breed — eventually, they were paid really well. They were in the tabloids, they had spinoffs. I’m sure the return to Earth is even more jarring for those folks.”

It is: Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino entered rehab last March and is being sued by a vodka company. Angelina Pivarnick is on the Internet, asking for donations to fund a new reality show. Jennifer “JWoww” Farley co-starred on the MTV spinoff “Snooki & JWoww,” which aired its second-season finale last week but is unlikely to be renewed. The original concept was a drunker, wilder “Laverne & Shirley,” but since Snooki gave birth last summer, that conceit is dead. JWoww’s most recent TV appearance was on “Stars in Danger: The High Dive.”

Even Paul “Pauly D” DelVecchio, who has built a lucrative post-“Jersey Shore” career as a DJ and is signed to 50 Cent’s G-Note label, has had a hard time adjusting. His first few weeks after “Jersey Shore” were so disconcerting that he’d find himself waiting to leave the house, convinced a camera crew was getting ready to film him.

“Then you realize,” he says, “that no one’s waiting for you.”

MTV has given four cast-members spinoffs. “The Show with Vinny,” premiering May 2, will feature celebrities coming to dinner at Vinny’s family home on Staten Island, and the network hopes it will fare better than its predecessors: “The Pauly D Project,” which ran for one season in 2012, and “Snooki & JWoww.”

Since becoming a mom, Snooki has extended her tabloid narrative but has had trouble lining up another job.

Once among the highest paid reality stars — for the first season, MTV paid the cast no salary, but by the end, Snooki, The Situation and Pauly D made the most, with $2.5 million each for Season6 — Snooki is attempting to transition. She prefers to be called by her real name, Nicole, and is living with her baby and her fiancé, Jionni LaValle, in his parents’ home in northern New Jersey. Like most of the female cast members, she has gotten plastic surgery and lost weight and she sells perfume, bronzer and jewelry on her Web site. “I love my career and my products,” she says. “I feel like this is just the beginning for me.”

At the height of her fame, Snooki published three books: “A Shore Thing,” “Gorilla Beach” and “Confessions of a Guidette.” She’s now working on a fourth, about her pregnancy, but has no publisher yet. She and Jionni would love to do an MTV reality series around their upcoming wedding, but the network has yet to bite. She would like to get into hosting and thinks she would be perfect for late-night TV, but otherwise does not know what it feels like to be normal because, she says, nothing has changed.

“I still haven’t really had real life, because ‘Snooki & JWoww’ has been so good,” she says. “It hasn’t really stopped, yet. Hopefully, it’ll never stop.” She still does the red carpet occasionally, and on Thursday night, Snooki attended a Wrestlemania Sandy relief benefit at Cipriani Wall Street. Also, there were her former co-stars and real-life couple Ronnie and Sammi, who now live together in a condo rental in White Plains. Ronnie occasionally films movie promos for MTV and is hawking a liquor line called Smush cocktails, while Sammi has three perfumes and a clothing line.

Sammi thinks she and Ron should definitely have an MTV spinoff — “I think a lot of people love our relationship” — but again, the network hasn’t expressed any interest, so she’d like to get into hosting. “I want to be the next Giuliana Rancic,” she says. “I love reading off prompters.” This will be the first summer in nearly four years that she’s not reporting to the Jersey Shore for filming. “It’s been very different. No more cameras in my face,” she says. “I kind of miss them.”

For Deena, the end of the show is a bit more complicated. She was brought in toward the end of Season 2 after troublesome original castmate Angelina was expelled. At first, Deena was excited: Here she was, a small-town girl who had been bored senseless working as a dental assistant, flailing around and never interested in school — and now she was guaranteed to become a star. But on her first night in the house, she was so nervous that she got incredibly drunk, and then she was getting slammed online for the way she looked, for being another short, boozy guidette who toppled over in public and was nothing more than Snooki’s sidekick — “the meatballs,” she says.

Losing weight and changing her appearance helped, but it wasn’t enough. During filming — which could last anywhere from six to 12 weeks — the cast was kept isolated, away from computers, cellphones, family. While shooting Season 3, the producers sat the cast down each week and made them watch Season 2 in real time with the rest of the world, and everything that aired, the lying and the backbiting and the cheating, caused major eruptions in the house. Deena began having panic attacks, which she hid from producers, knowing they’d turn it into a storyline. She wound up drinking even more to cope, and says she couldn’t wait for her parallel life to come to an end.

“I was crying a lot,” she says. “I felt very sick this last season. I wasn’t myself. I’m kinda happy it’s over now.”

She still has her Web site and likes getting recognized, which happens anywhere that’s “populated by people,” but prefers living out in rural New Jersey. She wants to go back to school to study hair and makeup, and her biggest conundrum now is whether to go work for someone else, or maybe open up her own salon, where she can regale teenage girls who want extensions with tales of her moment in time on “Jersey Shore.”

“It was awesome. I got the taste of it, and it was great,” she says. “But now, I’m back to reality. Real reality.”